The present invention relates to computing, and more specifically, to a cognitive computing framework to detect adverse events in free-form text.
Often, words have different meanings, or meanings that can vary based on the context in which they are used. For example, the word “blue” written in text may refer to a color, or to a personal emotion. As such, computing systems are unable to detect new words and/or words with varying meanings in free-form text with high accuracy. This problem is exacerbated in certain disciplines, such as pharmacovigilance, where, for example, the term “headache” may be associated with a symptom of a disease, an adverse event experienced after taking medicine, a precondition, and/or a slang term unrelated to medicine altogether (e.g. a nuisance).